If he had to complain about the car, Gregor would say that it was a little mischievous sometimes, almost like it was haunted. Gregor bought the used car directly from an old woman who owned it for years. He heard that she had died shortly thereafter, and when the car started playing little tricks on him – like firing off its windscreen wiper fluid when he walked past or having the radio change stations spontaneously or cutting off his air conditioning in the middle of summer – he naturally assumed that the old lady’s spirit had possessed his vehicle. He couldn’t remember her name, so he nicknamed the presence Nessie. They had a fairly pleasant relationship. He would speak to Nessie and occasionally stroke the dashboard affectionately. The spirit of the car seemed playful to Gregor, playing unpredictable, little pranks on him.

But they started getting bigger. Small electrical failures would crop up in increasingly severe places. His turn indicators would work erratically, earning him no shortage of angry honks on the highway. Strange noises would come from the engine, but when he took the car to the shop, the mechanic wasn’t able to reproduce the issues, so Gregor was left to drive home and ask Nessie not to make anything severe happen.

Then it did. He was driving home from work in heavy traffic, and the power steering went out. The steering wheel locked up. A curve approached. He screamed, pleading for his life as the cars honked and swerved to avoid his collision course with the concrete edges of the highway. At the last possible second, power returned, and he jerked his car back into a proper lane.

When he got home he determined to fix the problem himself. Sliding underneath the car armed with an internet tutorial on auto maintenance, he began prodding around between the pipes and gaskets. Grasping a cluster of wires, he found them frayed and sticky. Gregor discovered that it was not a Nessie that plagued him, but a nest. Thousands of tiny, hungry spiders poured onto him from within the car. As they filled his screaming mouth and blacked out his eyes, Gregor wished it had been a ghost.